Craft Notes
Three Types of Language: (Slogan, Fact and Thought Language)
There seems to be three types of language or ways of writing or speaking: slogan, factual and thoughtful.
Slogan: slogan language when a person speaks in cliches or ritualistic statements or as we say today, “talking points.” Cliché language can be found in romance or fantasy writing, and in most movies. We all know what cliches are, having scenes when two lovers are standing in the rain, having a life-affirming ending when the dying dad tells his kids that he loves them, the person who was evil the whole story breaks down and becomes a good person. There are a lot of abstract lines about ‘hearts’ and ‘souls.’
Heidegger called this ‘idle talk.’ Heidegger describes idle talk as gossip or that the talk has no Being, the Being of the talk is already disclosed. Which means what is said, does not matter and everyone knows it. And this essence of it not mattering makes people feel safe and secure.
I would say that slogan language/idle talk is talk is several things: first for the person who uses slogan language it is safe because they are speaking in commonly accepted parts of speech, that they assume are safe and normal. Second it makes the speaker feels like they are performing a ritual, that they are part of the society at large when they say these commonly used sentences. Third slogan speech is commonly connected with groups like political parties or social groups. The republican party currently has its phrase, “budget cuts.” A liberal might say, “Homosexuals have the right to marry.” A vegan might say, “Killing animals is wrong.” Christians will say, “God says abortion is wrong.” These are common slogans or talking points that these groups have. A follower of these groups carry these slogans like objects one would carry in their bookbag, when it is time, they take out the slogan and put it on the table for everyone to look it and say, “This slogan is me.”
Fact: Facts involve the stubborn. Fact language commonly involves science or statistical data. The data states this, which implies this. This is the difference between Bill O’Reilly and Rachel Maddow. Bill O’Reilly speaks in talking points and slogans all night. He sticks to the ritualistic statements. While Rachel Maddow puts up one piece of data after another and then makes claims she believes are true concerning that data.
Or the difference between Kant and a Christian theologian. Kant spoke in facts, The Categorical Imperative, the Kingdom of Ends, were facts to Kant. He laid down system that he assumed to be true. He didn’t write in common cliches or talking points. He wrote original thoughts he assumed to be true but gave you little room to work out your own thoughts.
Writers like Updike, Roth and Stephen King could be considered factual writers. Their writing is straight, not full of cliches and idle talk. But commonly it just takes data and writes out the data.
Thought: Thought writing is like Nietzsche, Nietzsche never wrote in cliches but at the same time he never concluded with statements of truth. He never resolved anything. Norman Mailer in “The Armies of the Night” and “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” wrote in thoughts. Mailer doesn’t concern himself with concluding statements, making clear and precise verdicts on the data. He has the experience and records the thoughts he had during this experience. Mailer doesn’t care if his thoughts might be a little racist or a little anti-feminist at times. Mailer knows that everyone has prejudices and it is important to record these prejudices for the sake of posterity.
Thought language is different mainly in the way that it involves ‘thinking.’ Rachel Maddow uses a lot of data and shows her point, but she never ‘thinks’ about the data. She has her liberal viewpoint and sticks to it because she wants democrats to win more seats in the next election. She never thinks about high debt and its future implications, only that the republicans are wrong on how to fix it.
Thought language is not commonly used because it requires being somewhat well-read, requires the person to think about what data/stimuli they are receiving, that you aren’t afraid of having your opinion changed, a certain amount of moral relativism and it requires that you don’t respond quickly. This can be seen with Wittgenstein, a common complaint of Wittgenstein is that he changed his views. Wittgenstein didn’t change his views because he didn’t have views, he had thoughts. Wittgenstein just thought about things, one day he thought this thought and another day he thought another thought. He wrote both of them because he liked to write down his thoughts. If Wittgenstein was a vampire and lived 500 years he would have written twenty more books that contradicted his earlier books because he wasn’t concerned with a resolution, he was concerned with the thinking.
What I mean by not responding quickly, is that when people argue, it is respected by most people that the people respond quickly to the points. But the only way to respond quickly in conversation is if you respond with slogans, if you are smarter I guess you could respond with slogans you’ve made up.
But a thoughtful person, will say, “I need to think about this. What book did you get from? I’ll read up on this.” Then they go and read about it and think about it and respond slowly. This is not respectable.
Thought language in literature mainly concerns experience, Kerouac, Proust, Pessoa, Yates, and Rhys all have this experience based language. The main character has experiences and as they experience things they record their thoughts and feelings in an intimate way.
No one really talks about ‘experience’ anymore. No one says, “I want to experience the Grand Canyon.” “I want to experience what it would be like to have this job.” “I want to experience being in love.” “I want to experience the taste of organic fruit.” “I want the experience of driving across America” “I want the experience of reading Dostoevsky.” “I need to experience life.”
Instead people are like, “I want to buy a new flat screen television.” “I need to get married before I’m 30.” “I want to own those American Apparel pants.” “I want to go to Europe.” “I want a Masters Degree because getting a Masters Degree will make me more marketable in the workplace.” “I want to read Dostoevsky.” “I need to make sure I have a good job and keep my things in order.”
It should be noted that, all three of these languages shouldn’t be put into the order of best to worst. All three have good things about them and we all use them at different times of the day. We all use cliches, have idle conversations, hopefully all use data based language, and sometimes we decide to think about things.
Slogan language is good because it keeps society together at a large, it creates a common language that we can all understand and creates unity amongst the populace. But sometimes slogan language can turn into political nonsense involving racist and sexist overtones.
Data language is good but it doesn’t involve thought, most of the times specific data is picked out to prove one’s prejudice.
Thought language can turn into serious problems, Nietzsche’s writing helped with Nazism.
But the point of writing this is to explain the writing of Muumuu House writers or many writers that are appearing on the Internet under the age of 30.
To me the writing of Sam Pink, Brandon Scott Gorrell or Ana Carrete who isn’t a Muumuu House writer, seems to be about experience. There is a love for life, an exuberance in them which comes out in their writing. A combination of Saint Augustine and Nietzsche, that thought pattern that says that life is really important and should be experienced and thought about.
On Jack Kerouac’s grave it says, “He honored life.” What it means to ‘honor life’ is that you live fully, and experience things fully. You don’t just sit around making judgments and planning on how to get the next thing you want.
* * *
Noah Cicero has several books published, The Human War, The Insurgent and recently released Best Behavior. His first book The Human War has been in a feature length by Sangha films. He has been published in many locations on the web and in print. He lives in Youngstown, Oh and is currently finishing a degree in Political Science at YSU. And for some strange reason he is acting in a film production of Tao Lin’s Shoplifting at American Apparel also being created by Sanga films.
Every time I finish reading an essay by Noah Cicero, I feel more enlightened and I wish I had the guts to be less of a consumer.
I like what you said about experiencing things versus wanting and needing them. I want to start thinking like that.
i enjoyed reading this. thank you.
i don’t know how to get your books in Canada.
Hi Noah. I’m excited that you appreciate and/or like Ana C.’s writing. My favorite part of this essay was the bit about experience, experiencing things
Ugh. Noah. Weak inductive logic. I know, I know, not logic, just thoughts, right? You can’t fool me. But this is not an attack, I just want to understand your thoughts a little better.
I infer the following from your essay, that there is, if not a higher value to be placed on “thought language,” than on “fact language,” though still less for “slogan language.” Which, ultimately, is why I should care about Muumuu House, but about that later.
When you speak about slogan, the words “cliché” and “safe” abound, and you use Heidegger to get in “idle talk,” “gossip,” and, to sum it up, “what is said, does not matter.” Fine. I don’t like slogans either, although, as you alluded, they do feed an interesting social need for ritual and unity through common language. I’d love to read an essay about that, incidentally, if you can point me to a good one.
I get a little confused when you talk about “fact language,” because I’m not all that familiar with Maddow, but starting with the phrase, “facts involve the stubborn,” seems clear enough, “stubborn,” specifically and exclusively negative in its connotations. From your description of Maddow, I’m guessing there’s a lot of data, which, correlative at best, is being represented as causal. Of course, the rational of us would agree that we prefer, at least, data to no-data. Some thinking, we know, must happen there, at least in the selection of such data to back up an argument. Arguments, as we learn in middle school, are easier to believe when they have some sort of data to support them.
Of course, it’s even better if they contain some sort of logic to support them as well, no? Logic requires more thinking, more in-depth thinking, but here is where we make this weird jump in your essay that I’m still trying to wrap my little brain around.
You skip all that, the logic, deductive reasoning, etc, and opt for thinking without views or conclusions. At least, that’s how it comes off. Is that right? Writing down thoughts and experiences without concluding anything. But isn’t that just raw data? Raw data, again, without views or conclusions? So… I’m lost. And of course this only matters if it actually relates to literature, because it’s supposed to help me understand Muumuu House. Which I still don’t. I don’t understand why I should read that stuff. At least not anymore.
I used to think that that style of writing said something about a generation of people that grew up isolated by technology and consumer society, but if that’s the case, some of those writers are still writing the same damn story five years later. Or, and I’m ready to admit it’s possible, I may have been duped. Maybe I projected my own conclusions onto the data, interpreted those works, in a way that was unreasonable. Maybe, as you put it, they’re just thoughts and experiences, written down. Maybe there’s no meaning, no truth to get at at all. Though you’d have to make a stronger argument to have me consider that’s the case for Yates, Pessoa, or Rhys.
I rejected some of the stuff that’s up at Muumuu House from Alice Blue for precisely that reason. The same reason I generally like your work Noah, because there’s always meaning to be gathered, a seeming purpose for your writing it down, and a reason for reading it.
“Writing down thoughts and experiences without concluding anything. But isn’t that just raw data?”
Oh my god. If you don’t put an opinion to go with that quote Stephen, I’m going to hit you.
“I think maybe one of the most common ways that people try to ‘connect’ with other people is by telling stories in a factual, concise manner that doesn’t ‘explain’ or ‘over-explain’ things or attempt to convey ideas about the meaning of the story. For example when two people who like each other a lot first meet they seem to like to tell each other stories about their childhood or previous relationships, and if they like each other a lot there usually isn’t a need to explain things, for example they wouldn’t say things like ‘the story I just said is interesting to me because the part about ____ was funny and emotional’ and then explain why it was funny or emotional. I feel less lonely when someone I like tells me stories in a concrete manner. I feel less lonely when I tell someone I like stories in a concrete manner.
I think Hemingway said something like that if he wanted to cause a reader to feel something his technique would be to focus on an emotion he had felt before and discern the concrete elements that caused him to feel the specific emotion, and then write those concrete elements, so that the reader would hopefully feel a similar emotion. I remember that technique and think that it works and would sometimes remind myself to do it. In Richard Yates and Shoplifting from American Apparel I would sometimes focus very hard on what concrete elements were experienced, and exactly what thoughts (what words exactly) occurred in the character’s brain, in what order, and to what degree, that caused the character to feel a specific emotion, hen attempt to convey those concrete elements and thoughts in what I felt to be the correct order. In Bed I would sometimes describe the emotion directly, without concrete specifics, and I think that works also. Any time a book makes me feel an emotion that seems familiar—and maybe every emotion seems familiar—I feel less lonely, to some degree, for an amount of time, I think.”
– Tao Lin
If it was me doing a version of Tao’s statements above, I might not use the word “factual.”
i was worried about being condescending, to be frank, sarah. thought i could avoid that but still imply something if i just put the quote. but below you’ll see possibly an explanation via the publisher of muumuu house
wish i would have typed above: it just seems like so-called classic books that nearly everyone reads as early as freshman year of high school contain thoughts and experiences without conclusions. and then there’s aesthetic-focused art, modernism, postmodernism, and on and on. and people call that literature, not raw data.
but i understand you have your preferences and assumptions coming in, even if you didn’t bother to acknowledge them (none of these comments are intended to have any rancor in them; these are just my thoughts, hopefully sensical; wassup alice blue prose)
Mmm… let me put it this way:
I type, “Oh my god. If you don’t put an opinion to go with that quote Stephen, I’m going to hit you.” I go to the kitchen. I open the refrigerator. I feel sick and hungry. I think, “pregnant.” I make toast. I go back to the office. I read Stephen’s reply-post. It is a long quote from Tao Lin. I feel pissy. I think, “Am I really going to argue with Tao-in-absentia?” I think, “This makes me feel very lonely and depressed.”
Because there is implied meaning. In fact, those classics are chosen specifically because they imply meaning in a way that is accessible to even those who haven’t read much.
i’m here, sarah. there are comments by me above too.
i had a longer response, but feels indulgent/annoying if you’re pregnant(?) hi. so yeah idk, the connection between his comments on “thought language” and muumuu house, as written, is not quite clear to me either, so idk…. here comes the stock: it’s all good, yo
alright. but most people have to read like “the stranger,” too, right?
and hemingway… in hemingway i think the effect is to create *emotions* not *meaning*
another stray thought i have is that when the superficial qualities of so-called realism are present, as they are in many muumuu pieces–recognizable setting, human characters who are speaking and doing things in the story–one might have a greater tendency to expect meaning (i wanted to scare-quote that hehe…) and other things one might not find in a muumuu house piece…. or that one might not find if one doesn’t find meaning or a feeling of feeling less alone (same thing? semantics?) in minutiae or confusion or self-conscious ennui, to describe a few muumuu hallmarks (maybe? idk).
in simply seeing/experiencing (tie in!) minutiae, confusion, self-conscious ennui, etc., not having it commented on, necessarily (although some pieces do feature commentary on the emotions or events therein, by the by)
even said commentary, hehe, is like “seems really bad.” humor also comes in handy when reading muumuu (or beckett… self-conscious ennui can be very funny!)
even if*
Well… not in my state, but that would be awesome. Certainly not Freshman year. But yeah, okay. so Camus.. I’m trying to remember this right, illustration of an absurdist’s world-view, so I can see why you went there, good fact/data/whatever use but I still loved it when I read it… because Camus was ultimately a humanist, and I thought that shined through somewhat, didn’t it? Wartime poverty, indifference towards the fellow man all up in that context… Shit. I don’t know. It did for me anyway. It’s why I loved Vonnegut too. He ultimately didn’t believe life sprung forth with inherent meaning, but, damn it, that shouldn’t stop us from being nice to one another, either. Comes up again and again in his work.
I’m going to have to stop this soon and get some actual work done, but yes, I know what you mean about creating emotions instead of meaning, and maybe I painted myself into a corner using that word, but I’ll still hold “still writing the same damn story five years later” against it. Or, alternately, “boring” and “lacks nuance, depth, or maturity,” (based on those I’ve read) which is too bad. Since I know there’s a mass of intelligence there being wasted (or not, clearly plenty of people like it) on self-promotion.
This is bound to be the generation that obliterates the line between art and marketing.
You’re lacking a very important component to this discussion: truth. Everyone has his/her own notion of it and it’s what attracts us to certain facts vs others, to certain thoughts, to certain experiences. And the truth is complicated, so is being honest: things that seem completely true end up being something else entirely. Most language and most writers still operate and are motivated by an attempt to uncover it.
Where would prayer fall into this slogan/fact/thought triad? I’m thinking prayer re: Wittgenstein’s criticisms of ‘The Golden Bough’.
Wilde was a good self-promoter. Joyce suggested his friends buy shares in “Joyce stock.” Dali… Warhol, obviously.
My main effort is to show that there is precedent for many of the qualities people disparage, precedent via artists a great many people love and revere and are influenced by.
Also, I’m kind of tired of this myth that literature is or should be the one artform in which the practitioners must maintain some sort of fusty decorum and supposed integrity via not reaching out to an audience and following their intuition, having fun, and using the mediums and technologies available to them to do whatever they feel like doing.
This may be a surprising comparison, but the Catholic church claims to this day to be “in this world, but not of this world.” Is this to be true also of literature? I say no.
Art and commerce aren’t mutually exclusive, but more importantly, to me, art and fun aren’t mutually exclusive, art and technology aren’t mutually exclusive, art and social media aren’t mutually exclusive, art and community aren’t mutually exclusive, art and breathing, shitting, crying, dumb, ignorant, beautiful, restless, naked, confusing human beings are not mutually exclusive… If the only thing holding you back from doing whatever you feel like doing is fear of not being “literary”…? What’s in a word
Maybe one could say that truth isn’t very important; rather, ideas are as ‘valuable’ as the benefit they give to those who believe them.
Knowledge is not power because ‘changing the world’ is not an epistemological problem.
this seems pretty imprecise. slogans, cliches and gossip are all entirely different. slogans are manufactured to get across a precise message. because it’s hard to simply “invent” a new word or phrase, they are forced into public speech using mass media. cliches are conventional phrases that have been overused to the point where they become shortcuts for complicated ideas. (slogans wish they had that kind of influence over language.) gossip is simply a type of speech used to reinforce reputation, and it can include all other kinds of speech.
i liked the headline for this, but it seems like it doesn’t really classify language as much as it provides a rough way to judge if people’s talking/writing is good, getting there or stupid.
Further to the “idle talk” concept, it’s also a method of affirming, reaffirming and testing social bonds/boundaries of any kind, whether within the groups you describe or in familial groups, with strangers, with authority figures etc. I.e. speech is never just about what is being said, it always has this wider social function, kind of like aural grooming. Important to assess language in the round with all our other communications.
I love slogan language when it’s private, like all the dumb jokes my friends and I make and then reference to each other for years and years, invented slang, the mean private nicknames we give to people, or the titles we give to outstanding nights – – like The Great 88, which happened one night after I talked my roommate into going to a pretty boring literary party with me where I felt nervous so she danced with me and we walked home drunk and found eighty eight dollars on the sidewalk in a series of many little clumps so that we were following a trail of free money home! It was so cool. And there was no one we could see who had dropped it. Felt like magic.
There is such a joy to be found amongst friends in polishing shared experiences so that they’re fun strange little self-contained stories – – really isn’t this what literature is all about? But the magic of literature is that the in-joke becomes one between the book and the reader, and then, in the case of famies like Tao Lin, between readers who have all read the same stories. It’s like having mutual friends, some of whom you like and some of whom have been given mean private nicknames.
When your friend tells you a story about something that happened, without offering a tidy conclusion, you are oftentimes sitting directly across from this specific person who you like for a wide variety of reasons and whose emotion you can gauge from tone of voice and facial expression and the weight of all that you know and share with this person. When stories forget that whole second part, they become empty. As some people feel Muumuu House stories are. But what’s so strange is that getting that second part in there can be almost invisible.
And really is probably best when almost invisible.
I once saw Dennis Johnson speak and he said that all the stories in his short best book were crazy brag stories he and his buddies would tell to each other over and over again. The famous lore of in-jokes amongst friends. Slogans based on real love and crafted out loud over countless beers for humor and bizarreness and the surprising inevitability of their plotlines. And they turned out rad. I think because of that.
I love slogan language when it’s private, like all the dumb jokes my friends and I make and then reference to each other for years and years, invented slang, the mean private nicknames we give to people, or the titles we give to outstanding nights – – like The Great 88, which happened one night after I talked my roommate into going to a pretty boring literary party with me where I felt nervous so she danced with me and we walked home drunk and found eighty eight dollars on the sidewalk in a series of many little clumps so that we were following a trail of free money home! It was so cool. And there was no one we could see who had dropped it. Felt like magic.
There is such a joy to be found amongst friends in polishing shared experiences so that they’re fun strange little self-contained stories – – really isn’t this what literature is all about? But the magic of literature is that the in-joke becomes one between the book and the reader, and then, in the case of famies like Tao Lin, between readers who have all read the same stories. It’s like having mutual friends, some of whom you like and some of whom have been given mean private nicknames.
When your friend tells you a story about something that happened, without offering a tidy conclusion, you are oftentimes sitting directly across from this specific person who you like for a wide variety of reasons and whose emotion you can gauge from tone of voice and facial expression and the weight of all that you know and share with this person. When stories forget that whole second part, they become empty. As some people feel Muumuu House stories are. But what’s so strange is that getting that second part in there can be almost invisible.
And really is probably best when almost invisible.
I once saw Dennis Johnson speak and he said that all the stories in his short best book were crazy brag stories he and his buddies would tell to each other over and over again. The famous lore of in-jokes amongst friends. Slogans based on real love and crafted out loud over countless beers for humor and bizarreness and the surprising inevitability of their plotlines. And they turned out rad. I think because of that.
Cicero’s post and the comments here are hugely interesting, and the remarks above in particular ring a bell (a cliché slogan) I’m tempted to expand the idle talk concept as a method of “affirming, reaffirming and testing social bonds/boundaries of any kind” to consider modes of communication and the extent they help create and enforce social boundaries, although I know “create” and “enforce” are harder words and a more abrupt way of phrasing it, I’m very interested in how slang and jargon work to make social boundaries and silos of mutual understanding among those “in the know”. The area where Nietzsche did draw conclusions was in declarative aphorisms, and while it’s true that his primary concept of overcoming was explored allegorically and polemically to no tangible end, he did draw direct conclusions such as “The first thing we have to overcome is our parents” which are fantastic words to live by.
Cicero’s post and the comments here are hugely interesting, and the remarks above in particular ring a bell (a cliché slogan) I’m tempted to expand the idle talk concept as a method of “affirming, reaffirming and testing social bonds/boundaries of any kind” to consider modes of communication and the extent they help create and enforce social boundaries, although I know “create” and “enforce” are harder words and a more abrupt way of phrasing it, I’m very interested in how slang and jargon work to make social boundaries and silos of mutual understanding among those “in the know”. The area where Nietzsche did draw conclusions was in declarative aphorisms, and while it’s true that his primary concept of overcoming was explored allegorically and polemically to no tangible end, he did draw direct conclusions such as “The first thing we have to overcome is our parents” which are fantastic words to live by.
i like ciceros breakdown. he’s not saying slogans, cliches, and gossip are all exactly the same thing. i feel like he is saying more that they are a means to the same end: meaninglessness, familiarity, safety.
“slogans are manufactured to get across a precise message. because it’s hard to simply “invent” a new word or phrase, they are forced into public speech using mass media.”
right, and once its in mass media, it becomes familiar, it becomes a safe topic to talk to your friends about, it brings society together.
“cliches are conventional phrases that have been overused to the point where they become shortcuts for complicated ideas.”
and its in its over-usage that it becomes safe, its a safe way of talking about a bigger idea.
“gossip is simply a type of speech used to reinforce reputation, and it can include all other kinds of speech.”
i dont agree with the idea that gossip is used to reinforce reputation, or if its true its effect is residual compared its bigger purpose. gossip just happens. its bigger benefit, other than a benefit of hype for the gossipee, is that it gives people safe things to talk to each other about.
I feel that this is an nonacademic essay by Noah’s standards. I don’t know why Noah has consciously [?] chosen to overlook both Piercian and Sassurian semiotics, but it is to the detriment of the seriousness with which I was capable of taking the piece. In anti-realist terms, it triumphs in observation, and I think Noah is justified in comparing his own/Brandon/Tao/Sam/Ana’s considerations of experience to the stylistic qualities of Rhys/Pessoa/Yates, I just feel a semiotic angle was not the most profitable way of going about it.
i think there is another category that is smaller perhaps and in front of slogan in terms of meaningless, but where it may lose its safety aspect, which would be a purely emotive talk, which i think prayer can fall into. it has no meaning, it is purely emotive. screaming/crying/outrage. its purpose is only catharsis for the emoter, and it may or may not have regard for safety nets.
i think there is another category that is smaller perhaps and in front of slogan in terms of meaningless, but where it may lose its safety aspect, which would be a purely emotive talk, which i think prayer can fall into. it has no meaning, it is purely emotive. screaming/crying/outrage. its purpose is only catharsis for the emoter, and it may or may not have regard for safety nets.
i enjoyed reading this
felt high levels of interest throughout
i have been thinking about this after reading it
i have never thought about things like this
i feel like this articulates, to some degree, something i’ve never felt able to articulate, to myself or any one else, i think
i feel comforted thinking about “thinkers” and other people who might not want conclusions or answers but who just to explore and experience things
A semiotic argument:
Two people are talking, one uses a certain slogan, “I do not believe in abortion.” The listener who is also against abortion does not see abortion or belief in abortion in their mind. Actually no images concerning abortion occur to the listener. The listener does actually see anything. They get a feeling that they have found on of their people. These person who also does not believe in abortion is one of them. They are somehow in a unified whole, a leviathan if you will of people who believe in anti-abortion.
Stephen King writes a book. It involves a cemetary where if you bury something that is dead, it came come back to life. The writing is no slogan based. The idea of a dead boy on a murder rampage is pretty original. not done in the history of literature. But no one asks in the book, “Why the fuck would I bury a dead boy in the middle of the woods because an old guy told me.” Everything in the story is true, just plan data. You are getting data. The reader takes this data as true. The characters do not deal with the experience and flip out and have emotional reactions. The characters are there to push the plot along, to make more things happen. Things keep happening. The reader sees these things happening and now that normal humans would never behave like that. But it brings about a different universe, a universe unlike their own. A place where the dead can be brought back to life. This is enjoyable becausae reality is turned on its head. The reader dislikes the constraints of reality. They find the reality of death displeasing. Stephen King has a moral though: that death is okay because if you came back from the dead you might go on a murder rampage. This makes senes to the reader. The data presented, “come back from the dead, equals murder rampage” makes sense.
The experience, what is the experience? What is experience? To go through something. To know what it feels like, what it tastes like, what it smells like, the tactile event. The palpable event. What does it mean to experience something? Say you go to a strip joint for real or ride around for cops for real, researching a book or you were a cop or a stripper. You know what people really say in those experiences, what people really behave like, how they react, what they feel like. Sam Pink is interesting because he knows what it feels like to be at a grocery store in chicago, he knows what a person will see there, what a person will smell there, what objects they might touch with their hands. There’s this scene in Person where the character is looking at an orange and saying it is “goodness.” The orange signifies “goodness.” “Goodness” is a feeling not an image. The person doesn’t see an orange in their head, they feel what an orange means.
I don’t believe that people get images in their heads but get ‘feelings’ in their bodies.
Catch phrases create emotions.
Describing an undead child creates an emotion.
Holding an orange creates an emotion.
i liked the line, “I think, ‘pregnant.'”
Just as an aside (because I really understand very little of what Stephen and Sarah are saying, and I don’t have the time to do my research and ‘respond slowly’), I wanted to say that ‘data language’ is used exclusively in scientific writing, and works incredibly well there. Though I would love to see someone attempt to write a laboratory report in ‘experience language’ (oh, look, I’ve just found my weekend project).
slogans are indeed a means to an end.
but the end is not “meaninglessness, familiarity, safety”.
the end to which slogans are devoted is power.
the point of communicating a perspective of a complicated topic in slogans is that, then, people who lazily accept, or are bombarded into intellectual quiescence by, slogans will then be at peace with not ‘thinking’ the ‘thought’ of those complications.
in opposing “resolution”, I feel like that noah cicero is arguing for a speciously apolitical perspective of how language works.
noah cicero is talking about language as a reproducer of a degree or even a state of intellectual engagement, but noah cicero is not talking about the point of engagement, except to recommend – irresolutely; ha ha – a “thought pattern that says that life is really important and should be experienced and thought about”.
by talking about engagement without considering the political dimension, except in the form of being ‘for’ or ‘against’, noah cicero is making a schema with is incoherent with respect to its own “life […] should be”.
a schema which is incoherent
deadgod, there are many comments made by you after which i want to comment: deadgod, i want to have your baby
this is one of them
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Noah, I applaud what you say here about the value of experience and the implication that it is a value worth pursuing, maybe a mode of living. What I’m not sure about is your three types of language and how you categorize authors and philosophers (and political commentators) on the basis of them. For instance, I believe Rachel Maddow certainly has an agenda, but her reliance (perhaps expressed as an overreliance) on facts is a way of conveying ideas. She’ll connect x and y and z in order to show that what’s happening in Wisconsin is political rather than budgetary, for instance. In a sense I’d argue that her rhetorical mode traces back to Socrates in a sense–that if people know the truth (i.e. facts), they will act morally, that immorality more often than not derives from distortion of the facts. I’m also not seeing how, for instance, someone like Roth is a “fact”-based writer. Take The Human Stain, which grapples with issues of political correctness, sexuality, race, class, PTSD, gender, power, etc., all played out in a polyphonic set of voices riffing in long, musical sentences. Like it or dislike it, to call it “factual”/”data-driven” seems to misrepresent it. That said, I like where I sense you are going with this, in an embrace of “exuberance” that can sometimes get overlooked in pragmatic daily life (but check out that cow-milking scene in Human Stain, I mean Roth is celebrating the daylights out of that, it seems to me.)
i didnt read anything political from ciceros thing. i didnt read it as being for or against anything. i just thought the categories were interesting.
i didnt read anything political from ciceros thing. i didnt read it as being for or against anything. i just thought the categories were interesting.
[…] Three Types of Language: (Slogan, Fact and Thought Language … […]
This is my favorite thing I’ve ever read on this site.
This is my favorite thing I’ve ever read on this site.
“i didn’t read anything political” is a strange thing to say about:
“i didn’t read anything political” is also a strange thing to say about:
“[not] as being for or against anything” is a strange thing to say about:
and
and
I also think that the “categories” are “interesting”, but not “just” “interesting”.
darby, what do you think “politics” ‘is’?
What is the effect, on you, of the judgement that judgements are ‘bad’, or, at least, that “sit[ting] around making judgments” is to be avoided?
your article did not make me feel lonely or depressed, noah cicero.
If you are interested in a different way of talking about “idle talk”, you can find one in Heidegger’s Being and Time, specifically in section 35, “Idle talk”, and section 38, “Falling and thrownness”.
(The German word is das Gerede, which, as one translator points out, Heidegger tries to talk about in a non-disparaging way, a way that would get at what “idle talk” does disclose, and not that would spend much energy on what “idle talk” does not disclose. It is hard, for a parallel example, to talk about something being “idle” in a way that is not disparaging.)
“Thought language can turn into serious problems, Nietzsche’s writing helped with Nazism.”
You might want to elaborate on that or clean up the sentence a little bit. You could say that Nazism manipulated Nietzsche’s writing and explain how, but the writing itself didn’t help this ideology. Using your own terminology, the Nazis reduced the language of thought into the language of slogans. I don’t think this is inherently the fault Nietzsche’s “thought language.”
I feel like that, in opposing “resolution”, noah cicero confuses commitment with ‘no longer thinking critically’.
the “rachel maddow” calumny is a good example of this confusion in noah cicero’s discussion and, perhaps, in noah cicero’s “thought”.
noah cicero says:
the fact that rachel maddow argues about “how”, and not ‘whether’, to fix high debt, in the context of arguing about its priority from the political-economic point of view, suggests that she has thought and continues to think “about high debt and its future implications”, not that she “never” does.
rachel maddow’s progressive commitments do not obstruct her from “thought”; nor are they signs of her not “thinking”.
because her progressive commitments are alongside a commitment to the ‘stubbornness’ – a good word, like aristotle’s “intractability” – of facts, but not to any conclusion some particular fact could lead to, rachel maddow’s progressive commitments are enablements of “thought”, not disablements of it.
– as would be conservative commitments in alliance with a conservative’s commitment to the ‘stubbornness’ of facts.
(in speaking of rachel maddow’s commitments in this way, I, as noah cicero has done, am inferring, or ‘guessing’, from the evidence of her journalism – that is, reading, perhaps imperfectly, from, and perhaps into, her journalism.)
What Neil Griffin wrote. I know it’s still super fashionable to sound kind of flippant, say whatever to get attention–and that’s nice. You’re like the Charlie Sheen of the internet literary world almost. Not as poetic as Charlie Sheen, but almost as cute-sounding. Of course, I won’t remember anything you have written five minutes from now, but you’re writing is deliberately made that way. And I like that.
Holding an orange creates the image of an abortion, which makes me feeling tingly down there. This “experience” has very little to do with signs per se and more to do with my love for language. It is really difficult to pin down language–or my love for it–and say, “It is this and only this.”
The Catholics have spawned a lot of amazing writers, some of whom you have already mentioned, and they’d definitely fit that quote. I’d like it if more literature fit that quote as well. Some work does not.
You don’t know me very well, so I’ll tell you, I would never, EVER say that art, literature, etc. should be just one thing. Nor would I ever suggest that certain things should not be published.
However, I’m not going to hold back when I think certain work is a waste of my time. I won’t subject our readers to work that I think would be a waste of their time, either. I like work that challenges me in some way, gives me ideas, shows me something about life I didn’t know. I read to be stimulated intellectually. It’s the same reason I join conversations….
…but this conversation is turning into one of THOSE old conversations, don’t you think? I feel like I’m not learning anything anymore….
…unless you believe in God. …Christ. Is EVERYONE here an atheist?
Or a visual poem using data language! Another weekend project. Good call. Sorry. If my dad were here, he’d “like” your comment too.
…unless you believe in God. …Christ! Is everyone here an atheist?
“Writers like Updike, Roth and Stephen King could be considered factual writers. Their writing is straight, not full of cliches and idle talk. But commonly it just takes data and writes out the data.”
So I haven’t read tons of Updike, Roth, or King, but I don’t find this to be AT ALL true for any of their works that I have read.
It could just be that since their writing is older than ourselves (in general), what seems cliche now was innovative then.
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